Masaaki Suzuki playing the Schnitger/Hinz organ in the Martinikerk, Groningen

The recipient of the 2012 City of Leipzig Bach Medal, Masaaki Suzuki has earned an enviable reputation as an interpreter of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach – as a reviewer in International Record Guide has put it: 'With Suzuki you can hear Bach's heart beat'. To a wide audience he is known as the director of Bach Collegium Japan, and the moving force behind the ensemble's acclaimed recordings of Bach's complete sacred cantatas. Perhaps less well known is that he began his career – at the age of 12! – playing the organ at church services in Kobe, where he was born. Suzuki has remained true to the organ throughout his life, and for BIS he has previously recorded Bach's German Organ Mass, as well as programmes of Buxtehude and Sweelinck. He here appears on a disc which combines some of Bach's best-loved works for the instrument, including the D minor Toccata and Fugue, the Partitas on ‘O Gott, du frommer Gott’, BWV 767, the Canonic Variations, BWV 769, and the celebrated Prelude and Fugue in E minor, BWV 548. The recording was made in Groningen's Martinikerk, with Suzuki performing on the renowned organ, one of the most important and impressive in the Netherlands.

Nybyggnan is a folk music saxophone concerto in chamber music format. Its title, meaning ‘new building’, is a nod to other tunes in Swedish traditional music associated with buildings and construction work. Himself a viola player and holder of a master’s degree in folk music composition from the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, Adrian Jones has constructed his concerto in six parts using a set of newly written tunes in a folk idiom and with elements from jazz, heavy rock and classical music. Written for chamber forces it also forges a bridge between folk music and the chamber music scene. Nybyggnan was composed for Daniel Reid, who as a saxophonist is something of a pioneer in Swedish folk music. Composer and soloist have a shared background going back to their student days, and Nybyggnan is the result of a close collaboration between them. It also includes improvisatory passages as well as a couple of cadenzas. Daniel Reid is joined by a string quartet which includes the composer as well as three other string players who move freely between styles and genres. Together the five also perform Daniel Reid’s own Rings on Water as well as Adrian Jones arrangement of the traditional Tingsmarschen (‘The District Court March’).

Although highly productive and respected in his lifetime as a composer of Lieder, Robert Franz (1815–92) has since become a peripheral figure in music history. One reason may be that he avoids dramatic contrasts and instead aims at an emotional ambiguity: ‘My representation of joy is always tinged with melancholy, whilst that of suffering is always accompanied by an exquisite sensation of losing oneself’, he once wrote to Liszt. As a consequence his music appeals to those who are able ‘to admire the nuances of a charcoal drawing without longing for the colours of a painting’, to quote from Georges Starobinski’s liner notes to this recording. As they began to explore the songs of Franz, Starobinski and the baritone Christian Immler were moved by their findings to devise a programme which includes 23 of the composer’s often quite brief songs. Using the poet Heinrich Heine as their guiding star, they present these – all Heine settings but from different opus groups – in the form of two ‘imagined’ song cycles. These are framed by further settings of Heine poems – by Schumann and Liszt, who were both staunch supporters of Robert Franz – providing not only contrast, but also the opportunity to discover how these three very different artistic temperaments treated the same material: some poems appear in more than one setting, notably Morgens steh’ ich auf und frage and Im Rhein. The Rhine, which played such an important role in the Romantic imagination and in Heine’s poetry, also runs through the programme, from Schumann’s celebrated song cycle Liederkreis, Op.24, to Liszt’s dramatic scena Die Loreley, and has given name to this album: Im schönen Strome (‘In the fair river’).

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Please note: The music on this Hybrid Super Audio CD can be played back in Stereo (CD and SACD) as well as in 5.0 Surround sound (SACD)

Sally Beamish – The Singing

BIS-2156 | SACD EAN 7318599921563TT: 73'56

Sally Beamish (b. 1956): The Singing, concerto for accordion and orchestra (2006)
A Cage of Doves (2007) for orchestra
Under the Wing of the Rock – version for alto saxophone and strings (2006/2008)
Reckless (2012) for chamber orchestra
Trumpet Concerto (2003)

The works on this disc of music by Sally Beamish were composed between 2003 and 2012. As a whole the programme highlights the inspiration she has found in Scotland, her adopted homeland, and its landscape and history, while also reflecting her interest in jazz and Scottish traditional music. Its title, ‘The Singing’ is taken from the opening work, a concerto for accordion and orchestra, but it also symbolizes her interest in song, be it Gaelic chants (as in the concerto) or a Scottish lullaby (Under the Wing of the Rock), and the more abstract concept of translating words into music, as in her Trumpet Concerto, which takes Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities as its starting point. As a composer, Sally Beamish often works in close collaboration with ‘her’ performers – three previous BIS releases testifies to her long involvement with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. On the present disc the three concertante works are all performed by the eminent soloists for whom they were written: James Crabb, Branford Marsalis and Håkan Hardenberger. The two former are joined by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, an ensemble which has performed works by Beamish on several occasions, in concert and on disc. Conducted by Martyn Brabbins, another champion of Breamish’s music, the RSNO has also recorded two purely orchestral works, A Cage of Doves and Reckless, while the Trumpet Concerto features the same team that premièred it in 2003: the aforementioned Hardenberger and the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland under Martyn Brabbins.

Please note: The music on this Hybrid Super Audio CD can be played back in Stereo (CD and SACD) as well as in 5.0 Surround sound (SACD)

Kurtág – Kafka Fragments

BIS-2175 | SACD EAN 7318599921754 TT: 58'08

György Kurtág (b.1926): Kafka Fragments for soprano and violin, Op.24

Caroline Melzer, soprano / Nurit Stark, violin

One of the truly grand old men on the music scene today, György Kurtág composed his Kafka-Fragmente in the mid-1980s, and these forty settings of text fragments by Franz Kafka remain one of his most often-performed works. Although the cycle contains no single narrative thread and tells no coherent ‘tale’ it has become quite common to present it in staged versions – perhaps because of the hypnotic images that emerge in the texts, as well as in the music. Many of the movements are extremely brief; in the present recording 11 of the movements are less than half a minute long, and the shortest (Es zupfte mich jemand am Kleid / Someone tugged at my clothes) lasts only 13 seconds. However, to quote the insightful liner notes by the musicologist Philippe Albéra: ’Within these miniature spaces, expressivity – as if through a process of crystallization – is pushed to its utmost limits.’ Collected by the composer, the texts have been extracted from Kafka’s letters, diaries and notebooks; shards that together form a mosaic at times sardonic, absurd, lyrical or humourous. Kurtág’s ability to convey a wide range of situations and emotions transforms each fragment into a vision of dreamlike intensity, where the real becomes surreal, and Albéra finds a symbol of the spirit of Kurtág’s music in the 16th fragment, Kein Rückkehr, and Kafka’s aphorism: ‘From a certain point on, there is no going back. That is the point to reach.’ The often highly virtuosic and demanding score is here interpreted by the soprano Caroline Meltzer and the violinist Nurit Stark, both performers with a strong commitment to contemporary music who collaborated with composers such as Aribert Reimann, Sofia Gubaidulina and Viktor Suslin.